This will be a tidy column. Clean points; neatly organized. And they'll be packed into this horizontal container in proper order.
The reason is simple. The culture's tidiness obsession is at an apex.
It would be easy to start with Marie Kondo. So many thoughts come attached to that neat little name. Her books, including The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up, have sold more than two million copies around the world. On the surface, the popularity of the Tokyo-based organizing consultant whose KonMari process has rules, including tidying by category in the correct order, seems alarmingly compulsive – all those specific diagrams for how to properly fold different items of clothing.
But ritualistic neatness is a logical extension of the lifestyle-simplification trend that's been around for a few decades with magazines such as Real Simple, the rise in popularity of decluttering experts and stores that specialize in storage and organization products. That could be seen as both a reaction to excessive consumer culture and an essential part of it. You get rid of things in order to make room for new purchases.
There's also the reality of living in condo units of 300 square feet. And we shouldn't discount the power of the pursuit of happiness – the postreligion ethos of our time that drives much of our behaviour, right down to how to organize your underwear drawer, where panties can spark joy when they're folded like origami.
But surely, there's something deep down at the bottom of this obsession.
Consider Things Organized Neatly. That's the name of a Tumblr blog started by Austin Radcliffe in 2010 when he was a student at Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis, Ind. "I was spending a lot of time on Tumblr and I started seeing a lot of people posting photographs of things organized in an almost scientific way," the 29-year-old explains. Now, a collection of the blog posts, which were submitted by invitation on the site, has been published as a book. There's a photograph of a watermelon slice with the seeds extracted and arranged below it like raindrops. Other shots include artful arrangements of worn soles of shoes; different kinds of old bottles; tennis balls; playing cards; used plastic cutlery; an assortment of small metal locks.
A similar fastidiousness reigns over at SymmetryBreakfast, an Instagram account with more than 562,000 followers, which features a daily display of breakfast for two. On Tuesday last week, the offering was "homemade gorgonzola dolce and pear schiacciata with Ligurian olive oil, finished with a cup of Earl Grey tea containing prized bergamot oil from Calabria." It is all about the composition, but not just in the making of the breakfast. It's in the arrangement of it on a tabletop, on matching plates, carefully placed, with identical little side pots for sauce or cups of tea to create a perfect mirror image.
Started two years ago by Michael Zee in England, the blog began in a casual manner, as he likes to prepare a good breakfast for himself and his boyfriend. "A photograph's ability (and limitations) to reassemble fragments of memory, a holiday, a face, a meal or to document the staged and straight image is something that SymmetryBreakfast both questions and embodies," he writes on the project's website. A book version comes out in August.
It all feels a bit anxious, does it not? I'm an anxiety cleaner, so I feel the vibe. When my children lived at home, they would immediately ask me what I was worried about when they spied me with a rag in hand, scrubbing imaginary spots on the kitchen counter.
A priority for tidiness invites us to slow down and take the time to do small things well; the sort of tasks usually overlooked when we're anxious and in a rush. And part of me also sees it as a reflection of the aging population. As the body ages, it gets messier. Arteries clog. Skin sags. Those wrinkles could use a good ironing. So if the house of the spirit can't be kept quite as neat and tidy as it once was, heck, tamp down that anxiety by ordering that other house that surrounds you.
It is also a "calm respite" from the Internet and its "messy playground of information," as Radcliffe of Things Organized Neatly explains. "That's what people tell me. It wasn't intentional to make a website that was the antithesis of something like Yahoo.com that is jam-packed and hectic, but I think that's part of why it's taken off."
"It's hard to be against neatness and tidiness from a social-impression standpoint," explains Kathleen Vohs, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota. "The problem with messiness is that it's often linked psychologically to being not just untidy but being unclean."
That hang-up is exacerbated by our neatly ordered visual culture. "Aesthetic is much more important because of what goes on online," she continues. "The human brain devotes 25 per cent of the cortex to visual processing. We are beyond other animals in prioritizing the visual. They use scent and touch. Humans are primarily visually oriented. The advent of the Internet and social media can bring that to a head, bringing it more into the culture."
But it may be that what's at play in the culture is far more profound. As Grant McCracken sees it, "Contemporary culture used to look a little bit like a French garden. It was all symmetrical and ordered. And now it looks a lot like an English garden with things busting out all over. It's hard to see the pattern of an English garden, if you can at all," observes the Canadian-born culture guru, who was founder and director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and is now a consultant, author and speaker, affiliated with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.
Simply put, boundaries are disappearing in the culture: Transgender activism is erasing strict notions about gender expression; the division between work and home is blurred; and the division of labour is not governed by sex as much as it once was.
"It's hard for us to have clarity in the categories in which we organize. … Order has been replaced by disorder and a certain commotion and fuzziness and porousness.There is so little order in some areas of our lives that we prize it where we can have it," McCracken explains.
If the organization of very similar or slightly similar objects seems infantile – a bit like grade-school exercises in which the student is asked to figure out which object belongs and which doesn't – that's an indication of the need to continually hone our skills at generalizing, he says. "It used to be in our culture that you do that work as a child. You learn how to generalize. And then you're done. But in our present circumstances, we are not finished. The data has gotten more diverse. You have to keep learning how to do it."
But that doesn't mean we're stuck in a castle of tidiness; a refuge from the world.
Think of this neatness moment as "knolling." That's the term some artists use to describe the ritual of organizing and arranging their tools in specific order and configurations, like a surgeon's instruments in an operating room, before they start their work. Some of the inspiration for the blog Things Organized Neatly came from this practice.
Maybe the need to tidy is in anticipation of our most creative act – an appreciation for a world that's free of boundaries defined by sexual orientation, gender expression, job, class, socio-economic status and race.
That would be a nice, clean beginning.